Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 3

Collects: Amazing Spider-Man #559-563 (2008)

Released: February 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 120 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785132424

What is this?: Mary Jane crosses paths with Spider-Man again as Peter deals with the life of the paparazzi; Spider-Man learns about the Bookie.

The culprits: Writers Dan Slott and Bob Gale and pencilers Marcos Martin and Mike McKone

It’s been a year since I’ve read anything from the Spider-reboot, Brand New Day. I hadn’t forgotten about it, but I had put it on the back burner. But I was looking for something to review, and the local university library had Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 3, so here we are.

I enjoyed v. 1, but I felt it was using the reboot to tell stories that wouldn’t have needed such a drastic reboot if the Spider-books hadn’t gone off the rails so badly. I felt v. 2 was a bit of a misstep, focusing on an uninteresting villain and a mystical adventure outside Spider-Man’s bailiwick. Fortunately, v. 3 only makes one of those mistakes.

The first arc is written by primary Spider-scribe Dan Slott, and Slott manages to make the best of a story, like One Moment in Time, that had to be told regardless of who wanted to read it. Although the “return” of Mary Jane is ostensibly the big draw in Amazing Spider-Man #559-61, Slott does a good job of making Mary Jane only a peripheral part of the story. There’s not enough room here to do justice to the big emotional payoff we’d expect from the meeting, so Slott is satisfied with letting us know Mary Jane’s status quo. On the other hand, I’m not sure getting across her status quo requires the amount of presence she has in this story. It’s a tricky balance, and although Slott pulls it off as well as I could have expected, I’m not satisfied with MJ’s presence either.

The main focus is an obsessed fan Spidey dubs “Paper Doll,” a two-dimensional stalker who can make her victims two dimensional as well, causing suffocation because of their newly tiny, tiny lungs. There’s not much to Paper Doll except for an set of powers that is underused in comic books, but for a one-off villain, there’s not much more needed. She remains true to her motivation and doesn’t clutter up the plot (she probably should have gone after Peter Parker at some point, though). If there’s use for her in the future, her character can be developed better then. I do call foul on her real name, so subtly revealed I picked it up only on a third read-through: Piper Dali.

What Slott does best is update the mass-media world that employs Peter Parker. It isn’t as a radical (or unlikely) a shift as the Peter-as-Bugle-Webmaster Brian Michael Bendis gave us in Ultimate Spider-Man, but it’s much easier to take. Dexter Bennett, the new publisher of the Bugle, assigns Peter to the celebrity beat, something his Spider-abilities make him supremely suitable for. Of course, best friend Harry Osborne — reasonably a long-term target of paparazzi — isn’t wild about the switch in career, and Aunt May isn’t exactly proud either. Neither is Peter, for that matter, but the paychecks are good.

Spider-Man also fights a Web-savvy villain, Screwball, who translates her villainy into fame via the Internet. Maybe she makes money at it; I dunno. But it makes sense there would be someone like her in Spider-Man’s New York. The writer of the next arc, Bob Gale, also uses the Internet / villainy connection in a way that feels natural.

The second story is a two-parter in which Gale tells the story of the Bookie, the gambler at the Bar with No Name that sets odds for superfights. He’s appeared a couple of times in the Brand New Day setup, and I can’t say that I’ve ever wondered what his story was. Nevertheless, here we have it, and of course it involves bad luck, bad odds, and fixed games.

It’s a shame that Gale’s decided to focus on the Bookie when there’s not much interesting about the character. Gale seems to have a good handle on the villains at the Bar with No Name — the whole scene with Spidey in the Bar is well done, both by Gale and by penciler Mike McKone — and I have a great deal of respect for someone who decides to use the Enforcers out of Spider-Man’s entire rogue’s gallery. (I’m not sure about Ox’s characterization, but I’m not sure he’s been given a personality in almost 50 years of appearances, so I’ll let it slide.) His Spider-dialogue — like Slott’s — is spot-on. But I don’t care about the Bookie or his father or any of his hare-brained schemes, not even when it’s suggested the Bookie could have the answers to clear Spider-Man from the most recent charges of murder that have been leveled against him. Spider-Man is always cleared, more or less, so there’s not much excitement there, and I didn’t get the feeling that whoever is framing Spider-Man is that important. (From things I’ve read online since this came out, I know that might be wrong. But Brand New Day hasn’t convinced me of the culprit’s importance.)

Whatever I think about the plots, the art remains a strength for Brand New Day. The artists in this book have some of the highest quality-to-amount-I-like-their-work ratios other than Frank Quitely. Marcos Martin pencils the first arc, and although I don’t like the way he draws faces and human bodies⁴⁹, I can’t deny he knows how to make a scene visually interesting. Whether it’s Spider-Man debating with himself over whether to take celebrity pictures or Paper Doll alone with her collection of newspaper clippings, there’s rarely a dull page. I also enjoyed the fight scene in an art gallery, where Martin got to use his art studies to integrate Andy Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s work into the Marvel Universe — and into a fight scene. I enjoyed McKone’s work more, although I wasn’t quite as impressed with it. Still, the scenes inside the Bar with No Name were fun, as was the rescue on Coney Island.

There’s nothing wrong with the stories in v. 3 — they’re fun, lightweight, refreshingly free from grit or heavy gloom. That’s part of their charm, and that’s a large measure of their problem; there’s no real substance here. No matter how strong the art, no matter how encouraging the new direction, the stories themselves feel like a sweet, frothy dessert with little to sink one’s teeth into. Like the rest of Brand New Day, it’s a strong reboot. The individual appeal of the stories, however, is much less, despite strong writing and penciling.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 2

Collects: Amazing Spider-Man #552-8 (2008)

Released: December 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 168 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785128465

What is this?: More post-deal with the Devil adventures with Spider-Man and his more appropriately themed villains.

The culprits: Writers Bob Gale and Zeb Wells and pencilers Phil Jimenez, Chris Bachalo, and Barry Kitson

Although I enjoyed the first volume Brand New Day, it didn’t guarantee I would enjoy the second. Given the rotating stable of artists and writers, I knew the quality and tone of Amazing would fluctuate over the arcs. So I shouldn’t be surprised I didn’t particularly care for Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 2.

The first three-issue arc and the final issue of v. 2 are written by Bob Gale, who is best known for co-writing the Back to the Future movies and a Daredevil arc few liked between the ones almost everyone did like (v. 2 #20-5). Gale’s work focuses on a new villain: the Freak, a drug addict who injects a bunch of samples from Curt Connors’s lab looking to get high. Instead, the Freak gets mutated. And every time he’s “killed,” he goes into a chrysalis and mutates again, becoming immune to whatever killed him.

The Freak didn’t thrill me. A villain who gets more powerful every time he’s defeated is difficult to make work because eventually he has to win or become a joke, neither of which is good. (The former can work; it just rarely does.) The final issue seems a throwback to monster movies of the ‘50s and ‘60s, where the monster has to be stopped with a common chemical (The Horror of Party Beach, for instance). The Freak, blaming Spider-Man for his predicament, desire revenge on Spider-Man; despite the Freak being the cause of his own misery, he doesn’t have to deny or confront his own shortcomings. He’s repetitive in his screaming and slashing; that’s fine for a villain who appears in only one issue, but when it’s four, that’s a bit too one note.

Gale writes a good Spider-Man. That’s one thing in Brand New Day’s favor so far: all the writers seem to understand Spider-Man needs to be funny. He also advances the plot with J. Jonah Jameson, dealing with his wife’s sale of the Bugle. He seems to overestimate the power of Carlie Cooper, the friend of Harry’s girlfriend who works in the coroner’s office; she seems to have real influence here, whereas in v. 1, she was obviously low on the totem pole. I also enjoyed a return appearance by the Bookie, but I have my doubts about whether some of the villains shown placing bets would really be in a supervillain bar. But perhaps that’s an art problem.

The second storyline, written by Zeb Wells, is a misstep. Spider-Man visits with the New Avengers and teams up with Wolverine, for no other real reason I can think of other than to show he still is part of the New Avengers. Then he fights Mayan snow ninjas (did the Mayans have much snow?), a monster from Beyond, and a crazed priest of a Mayan god. Nothing in those two sentences “feels” like Spider-Man, and nothing Wells does makes it any more like him. Joining the New Avengers was one of the screw ups that caused the “One More Day” / “Brand New Day” nonsense in the first place, and mystic adventures was one of the three major problems people had with the J. Michael Straczynski run (the other two being animal totems and Gwen Stacy’s Goblin babies). The banter with Wolverine is fun — like I said, all of the Brand New Day writers have done well with the Spider-dialogue, and Wells isn’t an exception — but Wolverine is gone after the first issue, and despite some helpful bums, the plot gets less interesting the rest of the way.

Still, there’s something about the art from Chris Bachalo that I enjoy. I can’t quite put my finger on it, though. His pencils tell a comprehensible story — a big challenge for him at one point — and his odd, angular style works with the odd, mystical story, complete with a monster from a place where the geometry might not be the same as ours. (It never says, one way or the other, about the geometry; that’s just my inference.)

I’m less thrilled about Phil Jimenez’s work on the first arc; it’s just as professional, but it’s less distinctive. It comes across as boring but effective; that’s not the worst review, but it’s not an endorsement either. I also don’t care for his design(s) for the Freak. It’s a hard job designing characters who are supposed to disgust the reader visually. The Freak is certainly revolting, but … the picture Jimenez draws is not as effective as my imagination. The story doesn’t give Jimenez the opportunity to obscure the villain’s deformity, but I wish he could have. I enjoy Barry Kitson’s Freak more; Kitson, who penciled the final story in Brand New Day, v. 2, has a Freak who is much more visually streamlined, less deformed, and more menacing.

Overall, because of the strong start on v. 1, v. 2 of Brand New Day is a disappointment despite its competence. Nothing clicks as well as it did in the first volume, and Brand New Day drifts into areas that are distractions rather than strengths for Spider-Man.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 1

Collects: Amazing Spider-Man #546-51, Spider-Man: Swing Shift Director’s Cut, backup story from Venom Super Special #1 (1995, 2008)

Released: May 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 200 pages / color / $24.99 (hardcover) / ISBN: 9780785128434

What is this?: The first collection of post-reboot Spider-Man stories.

The culprits: Writers Dan Slott and Marc Guggenheim and pencilers Steve McNiven and Salvador Larrocca and friends

I’m going to get this out of the way now and then move on: Spider-Man’s “One More Day” was a stupid, stupid idea, as many others have pointed out more forcefully and in a more timely manner. Trading his marriage, his happiness, and his wife’s happiness to the devil for the life of a woman who has been terminally ill since about 1964 makes no sense; I’m sure Aunt May herself would have said, “Don’t be a halfwit, Peter.” And given that Aunt May tends to “die” every 200 issues anyway, well, I wouldn’t bet much on her surviving much past Amazing Spider-Man #600. And what the hell is Mephisto going to do with a marriage, anyway? It’s not a commodity you can sell or trade or even use as a stake in poker game.

That out of the way, I can move on — as Amazing Spider-Man itself did — to Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 1. In it, Peter Parker’s a hard-luck 20-something in New York City, trying to scrape by on a photographer’s income while also being an outlaw hero. His marriage with Mary Jane never happened; Harry Osborn is back from the dead, after bumming around Europe for a while (to be fair, that’s essentially how they brought back his father); and Peter Parker’s back to being a hard-luck superhero, poor and rootless.

I came to Brand New Day with some misgivings, and I can’t say they were completely mollified. I admit there are some very good ideas here. The change of ownership at the Daily Bugle and Spider-Man’s interaction with superheroes who registered during Civil War are great plot directions; the subplot of a murder who puts Spider-tracers in the mouths of his victims is intriguing. The new villains were in the vein of Spider-Man’s old villains but without being too derivative. But this book seems all too pleased with itself sometimes, from Harry Osborn’s smug face to the Stan Lee-inspired editorial tags and narration. We’re going to back to the basics, it says, if we have to kill Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, dig up and zombify their corpses, and chain them to desks in the Marvel Bullpen so that you can get Spider-Man in the Mighty Marvel Manner!

In moving forward, Brand New Day is continually looking backwards, regressing Peter, rolling the clock back on his development, making Spider-Man a police suspect and Aunt May an activist (again), and generally trying to make it feel like the mid-‘80s (if not the ‘70s or Silver Age). But the past is gone. I am not interested in revamps, reboots (hard or soft), or reimaginings. Characters or the writers’ interpretations must grow and move forward if they’re to speak to new readers; if they don’t, the characters will die. Brand New Day wants to move forward, but it is determined to hold on to that past like a life preserver, little realizing it’s an anchor: it can steady you or give you hope, but it can’t support you.

And it’s a pity that overshadows the stories. Are they classic Spider-Man stories? Although they’re in that vein, they probably won’t feature in a Best of Spider-Man volume any time soon. But they are solid stories, with new and somewhat interesting villains (time will tell how interesting) doing unpredictable evil. There’s little confusion over the new continuity. Writers Dan Slott (Swing Shift, #546-8) and Marc Guggenheim (#549-51) do an imaginative job with the new Spider-Man setup. Editor Tom Brevoort’s manifesto, reprinted at the end of the book, has many excellent ideas: bringing back the supporting cast, creating new villains, sticking with consistent looks and characterizations on the old villains, making Spider-Man funny again. These are all excellent ideas, and they didn’t need a reboot to implement them. And the idea of the thrice-monthly Amazing with a regular rotation of writers and a head writer is an excellent plan; I hope sales remain strong enough to continue it.

Steve McNiven (#546-8) provides the pencils for the first arc, and Salvador Larroca draws the second half (#549-551). Neither really knocks me out, and I’m surprised that for such a high-profile storyline Marvel didn’t get bigger artists (nothing against McNiven or Larroca). I prefer McNiven, who seems to have a good sense of the kinetic nature of Spider-Man and gets the interesting challenge of drawing the chromatically reversed Mr. Negative. Larroca’s art seems stiffer and puffier, although that may be a result of the off-putting coloring, which seems to go out of its way to refuse to show any vibrancy. The names of the artists involved in smaller roles are better known to me: Phil Jimenez on Swing Shift and Greg Land, Phil Winslade, and Mike Deodato on some backups. John Romita, Jr., illustrates a two-page summary of the new continuity at the beginning of the story. For completists, Mark Bagley is the artist for Slott’s first Spider-Man story, a forgettable backup from Venom Super Special #1 reprinted at the end of the book.

After reading Brand New Day, I have a new respect for X-Men: Messiah CompleX. I enjoyed Brand New Day much more — much, much more, really — but as I said in the Messiah CompleX review, that book works better as a statement of what’s to come than as a book. Messiah CompleX says the future’s going to be different that what you’ve seen, so you better pay attention. Brand New Day says the future’s going to be a lot like the past, so if you want to take a snooze, you probably won’t miss much. For that reason, they average out to about the same rating.

Rating: (3 of 5)